Terry Baker, President and CEO of Pandologic and Chad Sowash, Co-host of The Chad and Cheese podcast, provided insights into the last decade of recruitment marketing in their recent webinar “Cutting through the Hype: A Guide to Programmatic Recruitment Adoption.” The insights come not only from these two experts in the field, but from a recent survey of employers and providers to HR tech. The bottom line? As Sowash puts it, “If you’re not using programmatic algorithms for talent acquisition, you’re losing a lot of quality talent.”
So, what do you need to know about the ever-changing HR tech landscape in order to win over quality talent? Here are the key takeaways when considering boosting your recruitment marketing.
1. Programmatic is a gamechanger
The past seismic shift from newspaper ads to website ads is just as big as our move now to fully automated programmatic job ad placement (i.e., it’s a gamechanger.) Once employers and job candidates connected more easily via the web, the talent pool grew on a global scale. Programmatic tech responded to this problem of scaling by using automated processes to sift through that “global” talent pool. In other words, programmatic enables way more data analysis than any HR team can master. Signaling the inevitable movement towards automated technologies, this past July the market took notice: there were 5 major acquisitions of programmatic job ad platforms by large recruitment marketing providers such as Indeed, Recruitrics, and StepStone. This signal shift indicates that the evolving landscape of HR tech is approaching full automation ever more quickly.
2. Integration is key
Like a true “ecosystem,” the rapidly changing landscape of HR tech has led to more tech in response, which can handle any HR process from your basic resume screening to chatbots designed to foster candidate engagement. In fact, the ecosystem is abundant with new tech. Baker and Sowash emphasize that this new abundance has one important solution on the part of providers: integration. If your one part of your tech cannot interface with your other tech it can create data silos, and your HR team will be less efficient when they have to transfer between systems, losing out on valuable data sharing and insights gained when your data and processes are centralized.
3. There is a perception disconnect between employers and providers
The results are in: the TATech-DirectEmployers TA 2019 survey shows a divide among employers and tech providers in how they see the effectiveness of their tech. When it comes to social media marketing tools, employers believe they are much more important than providers do, but both agree on the importance of programmatic. When it comes to ROI, 44% of employers believe their tech helps ROI most by improving quality of hire, while tech providers’ top reason (cited by one-third of survey respondents) is that tech is most effective for ROI because it reduces the cost of hire. This is perhaps more a signal to tech providers to provide better communication of how their tech works and to be responsive to employers’ needs. But it is also valuable for employers to know and research their vendors carefully.
4. You can’t use tech well if you can’t understand it
Lastly, when asked in this same survey about tech challenges, employers cited the inability to cut through the hype, explain the tech to principle stakeholders, or manage their tech as top challenges. There is so much tech available, and such a rapid shift has happened in the last decade, that it makes perfect sense that employers face the challenge of how to navigate this new landscape. It is clear that better education of buyers, users, and principal stakeholders needs to happen.
The rapid shift of the changing tech landscape means that tech has changed, but the industry as a whole does not suddenly consist of tech experts to operate it. Automation and user-friendly platforms will be important. Education and understanding will be key factors in the further evolution of programmatic technology. Finding the right vendor that both aligns with employer goals, communicates the value of their tech, and provides tech with top of the line seamless integration capabilities will be key for employers moving forward.